viernes, diciembre 23, 2011

After months of design and development of new ideas and tons of hours of testing, finally PasswordsPro 3 is ready to be downloaded!

All the current customers that want to migrate to the new version only must drop us a mail and we will send the new license for the version 3.

Several friends helped me in this process with ideas, suggestions, really thanks you very much to all them, and let me give a very very special thankful to my friend Claudio Bianchi, owner of FreeSharewareDepot by the invaluable help I received from him, with ideas and their clear vision about the shareware market. Thanks you Claudio!

PasswordsPro is a passwords and notes manager that permits to store in a single file lots of passwords, userids, notes and so, having to remember only one password that protect the whole file.

domingo, noviembre 13, 2011

Zinc HTTP Components is an open-source Smalltalk framework to deal with the HTTP networking protocol. This is a new project (started September 1st 2010) that is currently under heavy development. Our long term goals are very ambitious: we want to reach the level of functionality, scope, architectural clarity and maturity of the Apache HTTP Components library. Our short term goal is to offer working HTTP client functionality to support fundamental features in a Smalltalk image. For the time being, Pharo is our reference platform.

Today I read a mail from the author of Zinc, Sven Van Caekenberghe in the Pharo list, about the status of the framework then I had the idea of write this small article highlighting the Zinc features and status.

Next the afore mentioned mail:

Hi,

This is a list of the most important changes to Zn since May 1st 2011:

- added brand new ZnClient to replace all other HTTP clients (who became deprecated) this is an object to build, execute and process HTTP client requests, it has a rich protocol to construct requests and to access responses, it has various error handling options, it can reuse an existing connection to a specific host:port, it can handle sessions, cookies, redirects and authentication, it has many options (settings) with sensible defaults. here is the simplest example: ZnClient new get: 'http://zn.stfx.eu/zn/numbers.txt' and here is an example using some features to make a better HTTP request: ZnClient new systemPolicy; accept: ZnMimeType textPlain; http; host: 'zn.stfx.eu'; path: 'zn/numbers.txt'; contentReader: [ :entity | entity contents lines collect: [ :each | each asNumber ] ]; ifFail: [ :exception | self inform: 'I am sorry: ', exception printString ]; get- added support so that HTTPS works out of the box if Zodiac is present. this should work when Zodiac is loaded and the necessary plugin is present: ZnClient new url: 'https://www.google.com/search'; queryAt: 'q' put: 'Pharo Smalltalk'; get- added a new subclass, ZnManagingMultiThreadedServer, that keeps track of open worker connections so that they can be properly closed when needed. to use this server with the Zn Seaside adaptor, you can do this: ZnZincServerAdaptor new port: 8080; serverClass: ZnManagingMultiThreadedServer; start- refactored ZnNetworkingUtils, it is now (also) a factory for creating socket streams- added ZnDispatcherDelegate for straight-forward dispatching to mapped urls (thx Nick Ager)- cleanup of the cookie handling API- fixed support for HTTP proxies (thx Alexandre Bergel for reporting)- localhost URLs are now excluded from being proxied- working around SocketStream>>#atEnd issues by using #peek- implemented support for proxies that require authorization- introduced ZnConnectionTimeout process variable- added ManagedServers class variable to ZnServer to dispatch the system's #startUp/#shutDown messages to all server instances that are #register-ed- implemented client side support for If-Modified-Since and Not Modified- changed ZnMimePart>>#fieldValueString to return an empty string instead of 'nil' when the field is empty or absent (Thx Lukas Renggli)- added support for dealing with certain defaults in ZnUrl- added code to throw a ZnMissingHost exception when a bogus ZnUrl is used to connect to a HTTP host- added ZnMimeType wildcard constants #any and #text- added ZnHttpUnsuccessful and ZnUnexpectedContentType exceptions- added a nice example to ZnEasy class>>#getPng: (Thx Lukas Renggli)- added ZnUtils class>>#parseHttpDate: for use in ZnCookie>>#expiresTimeStamp- added optional delegate #close-ing to ZnServer hierarchy- added some Pharo 1.2 compatibility (ZnMultiThreadedServer>>#exceptionSet:)- lots of small fixes, cleanup and improved documentation.

viernes, septiembre 23, 2011

We are pleased to announce that we have launched a new service for our customers and all those who have needs related to software.

In that sense we have established an affiliation agreement with RegNow (the
industry leader in providing e-commerce processing services and online credit card processing for vendors and authors of PC and Macintosh software, freeware, shareware, electronic art, shopping cart, ecommerce provider and other data).

We are starting with 2 stores: SofStore.com and ArSol.net and we have plans to offer different sort of services:

Discount coupons

Software reviews

Personalized advice to specific needs of buying products

As usual, we will try our best effort, to give our customers the more qualified service.

For any question related with our software stores, please drop us a mail to:

martes, julio 12, 2011

Smalltalk is real objects technology, not only object oriented, the word of difference may make a world of difference.

This means that everything in the environment is an object and the only way to communicate with an object is sending it messages. It's all, objects and messages.

In addition all the objects live in an environment (the currently named image) as en ecosystem that is alive all the time. That means that you can modify your objects and the modification happens while the object is alive on the image.

These modifications and messages are written in a language. The Smalltalk environment has a language, also called Smalltalk, very simple and easy to learn and understand.

The main barrier to people wanting to start with Smalltalk is the Objects paradigm, but after a time changing the mind a new world appear.

Pharo is an open source implementacion of Smalltalk and the mission stated in its web page is: Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk environment. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent dev tools, and maintained releases, Pharo is an attractive platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications.

Pharo is currently in the version 1.2.1 as stable, 1.3 is almost ready and 1.4 in development and it uses the traditional virtual machine but also the new, faster Cog virtual machine.

The VM is particular to each platform, but the image run unchanged between platforms. A developer could be developing in Mac and deploy in a Ubuntu server with no problems. Also any other combination of supported operating systems.

Pharo is ready to develop almost any type of application from desktop to web with plenty of frameworks ready to use. Check here some success stories.

But also you can have you VM with lot of different images installed, because the installation is very straightforward, it's only matter of copy the images and sources in a directory, open it with the selected VM and it's all.